Paths Never Taken
by Runeless
Summary: Sometimes, it's the smallest change that takes us from caregiver to juggernaut, from villain to hero, from Air to Earth. Things that could have been. Oneshot, no pairings.


**Paths Never Taken**

Path the First

She finds it's easiest to kill soldiers when they don't know you're there. Sure, she can defend herself well enough (and some of her attacks work on everyone, regardless of any of their pitiful attempts to stop her), but it's so much easier to rid herself of annoyances when she doesn't have to worry about counterattacks from scared men. These men are just soldiers, common troops; no need to waste resources on a few pitiful Firebenders.

She also must admit she finds it rather thrilling to kill someone without anyone ever knowing she was there.

She needs to find the gate to the Royal Road, to where the royal palace of the Fire Nation sits, so she listens- listens to the water of the air around her, because it whispers what men have done. It keeps echoes, tells of what men have done around it recently, so she can find out what a husband and wife shouted at each other, hours after they'd made up, from a bowl of water in their kitchen, or, as now, find out where men are marching by the echoes in the dew. Water remembers.

She does too, and that's fine by her.

Her teacher taught her this, taught her how to follow the trails of moisture in the air, as they ring and lead her down a steep hill on a dusty plain. It's dry, here, in the Fire Nation, but that doesn't stop her. There are plants, and trees, and flowers and things, and all of them have water to be taken and used. Her teacher taught it to her, just like she taught her what she had to do with her life.

She owes everything to her.

She finally makes it to where the water said men were marching, a gate, and built deep into the side of the mountains. The thing is huge; she's seen examples of Fire Nation architecture before, military fortifications designed to stop ten thousand men, but she's never seen anything this impressive before. Who knows? Maybe this is what they do to guard the ways to the Royal Palace, even if it's a bit early to begin doing that just yet. She's nowhere near the Palace just yet.

Still, that won't stop her from getting there _someday_. A feral grin pulls at her lips. Yes. She will be there someday, and then they will pay.

Every one of them.

A guard moves; she smirks and reaches out. She forms the shapes and then she's _got_ him, all the blood in his body running at her command. Bend it, shift it, _tweak_ him just one little bit and he's dead. Blood pours out of his nose and his brain as he falls with a distinct _thump_. Nothing quite sounds like a dead body hitting the ground, she's found out over the course of her journeys through the Fire Nation, cutting a bloody swathe straight to the Fire Lord.

Another guard jerks about to the sound with a cry. He's apparently heard that sound before too. She stops him from informing anyone else by _grabbing _him to, she's got his heart and then that's all there is to it. He slumps over dead.

It's the work of another ten minutes to kill the remaining outer wall guards. She sighs. She's had her fun.

Now to do some _real_ work.

As Katara gathers the water of the land around her into the shape of eight great tentacles, the fist of the Kraken forming itself around her, she thinks:

_Thank you, Master Hama. Thank you, for showing me- after the Fire Nation destroyed my family and my home, and all I could think of was revenge- how to get that revenge. Thank you for taking me in when I came to you, having traveled half the world by using what little Waterbending I had to cross the ocean. Thank you for taking me in after I cracked open an iceberg out of rage, found nothing inside but ice, and slowly- so slowly- went mad, because I was seeing my tribe die all around me._

_Thank you, Master Hama, for taking me in when no one else would take in the freakish little girl, screaming her head off about how she was going to kill the Fire Lord, with her torn, tattered fur robes, and giving her the power to destroy a Nation._

Her assault on the gate began. It was her, one woman, one Waterbender, against eighty-three of Fire Lord Ozai's best.

It was no contest.

The ruins of the gate- not smoldering, which was ironic because isn't that how the Fire Nation left her people? They left hers burning, so she leaves theirs drowning- faded into the distance behind her as she continued her march north.

She was Katara. She was a Waterbending master. She was a bloodbender, one of only two in the world.

And she was marching north in revenge for more than just herself. She was doing it for Hama, who she'd left behind when she began this journey, thanking her for training and raising her until she was seventeen and ready to do this, three long years in which Hama taught her everything she knew; she was doing it for Sokka, wherever her little brother was, the boy she'd left crying and screaming on their island as she urged her little ice-raft to brave the waves between her island and the world.

She was doing it for the Avatar, who had died a hundred years ago and never come back since. She was doing it for them all.

Path the Second

He's enjoying the hell out of himself, here, in this kingdom. He is the first of all the fighters of the Earth King, a position he earned when he opened the man's eyes. He took on the entire Dai Li when they tried to stop him from talking to the king, killed most of them, and then told the Earth King the truth of what was happening outside his walls- _showed _him the armies arrayed against him. With that act, he became the man who the king trusted above all others. He is the man who killed Long Feng when the latter tried to betray the city to the Fire Nation, and he is the leader of their entire army.

He is also the exiled prince of the Fire Nation.

He never thought he'd achieve a position like this, not really; not ever since that night, during his long exile, that he decided to finally be free. He was tired of it, to be honest, of spending his whole damn life sitting on a ship waiting for someone who had been dead for a hundred years.

And, he reminds himself, there was something in him- buried so deep he wondered if it maybe wasn't an ancestor of his, urging him on in his blood- that felt that what his father did was not right.

So he cut his hair, blew up his ship, and took his uncle with him on a journey into Earth Kingdom territory. He let his hair grew out, he found a way to use his scar to win favor from the people, he fought the Fire Nation whenever he could, and he finally got to Ba Sing Se.

He snuck into the city and from there, everything was history.

He'd expected to get killed after cutting his hair. So far, he hasn't.

So with the life he has been given, he will fight the Fire Nation. His identity is common knowledge to all now- Prince Zuko, son of Fire Lord Ozai? Fighting his own father? He has become a rallying cry for rebellions all over the Fire Nation, and an inspiration to the Kingdom he now calls home. To them, he is not a traitor prince, but a symbol, that even his own blood rejects Ozai's evil. They trust him, have trusted him since the Earth King stood before them and said _This man has opened my eyes to the truth._

The fact that he won their trust so easily, so well, humbles him sometimes. The boy he was never grew used to admiration or love from anyone, except his mother.

But the man he has become appreciates that these are his people now, and he will die in their defense if he must.

He will see this war end, his father's madness crushed beneath the Earth Kingdom's boot, because that is what he feels- so deep in his blood that it must be that same ancestor again, smiling now at the direction Zuko's life has taken- is right.

Path the Third

He _hates_ being the Avatar.

He _hates_ knowing what the loss of Airbenders the world over has done to existence, has rendered the winds in the world mad, and untamable; he _hates_ knowing that it is his eventual destiny to, somehow, find the few scattered remnants of Airbender blood all over the world and bring them together again, from all the people whose grandparents or great-grandparents were half-Air Nomad or a third Air Nomad or whatever fraction of blood it entails.

But that will have to wait for another life.

He doesn't quite hate being an Earthbender, though he does hate _why_ he's an Earthbender. His last body had been protected by ice, but it split under the fury of a rogue storm, and his last form drowned before it could even wake up. It was sheer bad luck, that; it happened sometimes. His memories tell him so. The cycle continued and it was Earth's turn to have the Avatar again.

He's sixteen now, it's been sixteen years since his body died and floated out to sea; he's old enough to access all his memories, the past lives of the Avatar flowing through his mind. He hopes it is enough.

He heads to the Fire Nation at the tail end of an army, led by a man who used to be a Prince, and he hopes he can make it to Ozai before anyone else does.

He doubts anyone else stands a chance.

-

(Author's Notes: What are these? An idea I had, when I thought, "You know, if Katara ever really let loose, everyone in the Fire Nation would be in _so_ much trouble." Then I started thinking about what might make her do so, and reasoning that she never found the Avatar- that he'd died in his ice flow instead of being found- might give her time enough to think on vengeance and finally leave her village.)

(The others just came into place naturally after that. Earthbender Aang, good Zuko- and come on, we've all had fantasies where he went heroic like this ;)- oh, yeah, and Bloodbender Katara.)

(Enter this house, and leave some of the thoughts you bring with you!)

(That's an incentive to review. :)


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